Collaboration between engineers and customers is essential in addressing unique thermal challenges in data centers, enabling tailored solutions and advancements in cooling technologies.
Principal Application Engineer
When I was studying chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, I had a professor who said, “You might not remember everything you learn here, but you will remember the skill of problem solving.”
My professor was right. In the world of application engineering, no two problems are the same. At Henkel, I get the opportunity to work with lots of big data and telecom companies, and while their challenges are similar, their specific needs are never the same—so we have to use these transferable skills just as much as the lessons from the textbooks.
In this article, I outline how we go about solving these problems and finding the right solution for each customer.
The first place to start is with the customer.
By working alongside them, we can find out about their challenges first-hand. A typical example is thermal management. The high-powered chips used in today’s data centers generate a lot of heat, so our customers need thermal interface materials (TIM) to dissipate that heat and transfer it to the air-cooling systems, which can then cool the chip down.
When the customer enlists our support, there’s a bunch of things we’ll do to understand their unique requirements, and often as a result of this collaboration, we’ll need to develop a tailored solution. In other words, we’ll start developing a new product.
From selecting the right materials to developing a formula to testing performance, there are a lot of rigorous stages involved in the development of a new product.
Collaboration is critical throughout the entire process, but particularly during the testing cycles. At Henkel, we produce custom thermal test vehicles (TTV) that mimic the real application and enable us to feel confident that the TIM can withstand the temperatures for a minimum shelf life of 10 years. However, the customer also has to test it within their system in order to validate that performance. Here, we have to work together to make sure we get the most accurate results so we can stick to tight development schedules.
Tho Nguyen
As engineers, we have to learn how the customer does things, we have to “speak their language,” and we have to align with their ways of working. That’s not to say you can’t have your own style, though. It’s just that your main focus has to be on the customer and their needs. Because after you’ve built a strong relationship, everything becomes much easier.
This applies to lab technicians as well as engineers. In fact, I always say to my technicians, “I expect you to think like an engineer,” because in our line of work, the job should never be performed perfunctorily. Instead, we should always be questioning things like, “Why do we do it this way?”, “Could we do it differently?”, and “What are the trade-offs we need to think about?”
In my view, this is the collective mindset we need to ensure we’re constantly evolving, optimizing the process, and taking things to the next level.
This mindset is especially important when we think about the future. At the moment, our customers mainly use air cooling for their data centers, but in the next 2-3 years, we might see liquid cooling become more widely adopted. Then, after that, we might see immersion cooling come into the picture too.
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